(PM on Radar here.) This button exists! You can mark a transaction as safe directly from the Stripe Dashboard. If you don’t see this feature for whatever reason, just email support@stripe.com and we’ll get you access.
You can mark a transaction as safe directly from the Stripe Dashboard.
But only manually and retrospectively, no? For an online subscription business with extensive automation, if one of us has to go to the dashboard to fix something like this, that sale was probably already lost anyway. More likely, that failed charge already resulted in cancelling the subscription and all that follows, with a relatively low chance the subscriber will start again later.
From various recent HN discussions, I get the feeling that the team at Stripe totally fail to understand how devastating these false positives are to the growth of an online subscription business. For example, I have one business where it's not unusual for the majority of the entire churn in a month to be due to unexplained card payment failures with Stripe. Based on a back-of-envelope calculation, that business would be around 50-100% bigger today if those charges had worked and everything else followed the usual patterns.
Could you write to us to speak in more detail about the business seeing a majority of churn due to payment failures? That’s surprising to us; we’d love to help you debug it. My address is my HN username at stripe.com. We’re keenly aware of how SaaS math works and are as enthusiastic about your business growing as you are.
It’s possible you’re using our Billing product, which gives subscription logic out of the box. It’s also possible you’re not, and have rolled your own subscriptions.
If you’re using Billing:
We take into account that it’s a repeating charge and special-case that for fraud detection purposes, because it’s highly unlikely that a happy customer decides to become a credit card fraudster N months in. We can also do dunning (automated recovery of subscriptions) via email, so a single charge failure shouldn’t result in you losing the relationship.
If you’re not using Billing: we have a way to mark a charge as safe when you present it via the API, which you could do on e.g. established customers. (On the charge creation request, pass in {"fraud_details" : {"user_report" : "safe"}} or whatever the equivalent is in your language of choice.) You can do this for any charge where your business has prior knowledge regarding the transaction; we'll both a) respect the decision and b) update the fraud model accordingly. Note that your customer's bank is the ultimate authority on whether a charge goes through; they may decide to decline it for a variety of reasons even if you and Stripe believe the charge to likely be good.
You have a business decision to make regarding what you want to happen in the event that all automated systems fail to get a user back to a happily paying state. One option is to automatically cancel the subscription. I recommend you don’t do that in a subscriptions business, unless you have very, very tight margins (e.g. physical product not SaaS). We expose an option in our Billing product to keep the subscription active even if it isn’t being paid; we’d probably recommend you use that option and only cancel subscriptions on an explicit user request. This is a particularly important thing in B2B SaaS, where price points generally give you enough of a budget to get in contact with substantially everyone who churns and where it’s very easy for a single person associated with an account to e.g. ignore a few emails about it accidentally without having the intention to cancel.
